Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris became a star autobiographer on public radio, onstage in New York, and on bestseller lists, mostly on the strength of “SantaLand Diaries,” a scathing, hilarious account of his stint as a Christmas elf at Macy’s. (It’s in two separate collections, both worth owning, Barrel Fever and the Christmas-themed Holidays on Ice.) Sedaris’s caustic gift has not deserted him in his fourth book, which mines poignant comedy from his peculiar childhood in North Carolina, his bizarre career path, and his move with his lover to France. Though his anarchic inclination to digress is his glory, Sedaris does have a theme in these reminiscences: the inability of humans to communicate. The title is his rendition in transliterated English of how he and his fellow students of French in Paris mangle the Gallic language. In the essay “Jesus Shaves,” he and his classmates from many nations try to convey the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim. “It is a party for the little boy of God,” says one. “Then he be die one day on two… morsels of… lumber,” says another. Sedaris muses on the disputes between his Protestant mother and his father, a Greek Orthodox guy whose Easter fell on a different day. Other essays explicate his deep kinship with his eccentric mom and absurd alienation from his IBM-exec dad: “To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests.”

Every glimpse we get of Sedaris’s family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist (“for whom the word pen had two syllables”) by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn’t share his obsession with breasts, and sings “Light My Fire” all wrong–”as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match.” As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign “guessays” on what would happen in the next day’s episode.
The book is separated into two parts. The first consists of essays about Sedaris’ life before his move to Normandy, France including his upbringing in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina and his time working odd jobs in New York City, both times of his life that had already been mined for material for his previous book, Naked. The second section, “Deux” tells of Sedaris’ move to Normandy with his lover Hugh, often drawing humor from his efforts to live in France without speaking the French language and his frustrated attempts to learn it. Prior to publication, several of the essays were read by the author on the Public Radio International program, This American Life.

Better

Gawande, whose first book Complications, was one of the finalists for the National Book Award, sets up the new book into three sections: Diligence, Doing Right and Ingenuity. Many of these essays have been culled from the New Yorker where Gawande is staff writer. There is a beautiful essay on the miracle of childbirth and controversial ones that address malpractice lawsuits and a doctor’s presence at executions. One of Gawande’s many strengths is his skilful reporting and it shines through in all the essays in Better.

Even better, each story is peppered with real examples that make the stories come alive for the reader. There is the example of a young student of medicine whose cancer was allowed to fester despite telltale signs having showed up in an earlier X-ray. And there’s Mr. Thomas who has to come to terms with a diagnosis of Cushing’s syndrome, where his muscles gradually start wearing down.

Arguably the best part of the book is the first, Diligence, where Gawande shows how persistence with what might seem even the most trivial of discoveries makes big differences in the outcomes in medicine. Simple hand washing, for example, helps cut infection rates dramatically yet many skip it probably because the lesson seems unglamorous or its implementation in every single case not that vital. Diligence matters yet again when one doctor in India is out chasing the last cases of polio in the world. Through this section, Gawande expertly shows us just how tenacious medical professionals need to be to keep patients really healthy.
The heart of the book are the chapters “What Doctors Owe,” about the U.S.’s blinkered malpractice system, and “Piecework,” about what doctors earn. Cheerier, paradoxically, are the chapters involving polio and cystic fibrosis, featuring Dr. Pankaj Bhatnagar and Dr. Warren Warwick, two remarkable men who have been able to catapult their humanity into their work rather than constantly stumble over it. Indeed, one suspects that once we cure the ills of the health care system, we’ll look back and see that Gawande’s writings were part of the story.

I Feel Bad About My Neck

Beginning this posting with one of my favourite Books.

I am a bookworm or the similar term that my friends used to describe about a people who can not live without book, who spent most of their time in a bookstore, spending most of their savings in books, read books everywhere.
I am one of them.
First I am a literature fans before i started to read books in biography and memoirs genre.
So I Found these amazing Books.
Madame Ephron, allready found an art to going through her older but fun life. She found an art to make everything that looks satire to be more fun.
phron’s witty riffs on these distractions are a delightful antidote to the prevailing belief that everything can be held up with surgical scaffolding and the drugs of denial. Nothing, in the end, prevents the descent. While signs of mortality proliferate, Ephron offers a rebuttal of consequence: an intelligent, alert, entertaining perspective that does not take itself too seriously. (If you can’t laugh, after all, you are already, technically speaking, dead.) She does, however, concede that hair maintenance—styling, dyeing, highlighting, blow-drying—is a serious matter, not to mention the expense. “Once I picked up a copy of Vogue while having my hair done, and it cost me twenty thousand dollars. But you should see my teeth.” Digging deeper, she discovers that your filthy, bulging purse containing numerous things you don’t need—and couldn’t find if you did—is, “in some absolutely horrible way, you.” Ephron doesn’t shy away from the truth about sex either, and confesses, though with an appropriate amount of shame, that despite having been a White House intern in 1961, she did not have an affair with JFK. May Ephron, and her purse, endure so she can continue to tell us how it goes. Or, at least, where it went.
My opinion is you guys should read these funny books, and found every funny things in your life.
It will change the way you looked at your life.
Gosh…i might joined the cult where Madame Ephron was one of the Goddess